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Alzheimer’s disease, which affects an estimated 5.2 million Americans,1 is a devastating degenerative brain disease that develops slowly over time, and tends to be quite lethal in its final stages. According to the latest data, the death toll from Alzheimer’s exceeds half a million Americans per year.2 This places Alzheimer’s in the top three killer diseases in the US, right behind heart disease and cancer.

Who writes the policies for public health, and how? This is an important question, and if your initial answer is that policy is created by medical experts, based on the most scientifically compelling evidence available, you'd actually be wrong.

As recent media reports have revealed, dental policy, for example, is heavily influenced by the sugar industry.

As a result of this collusion, dental policy not only downplays the impact that sugar and processed junk food has on dental health, it also ignores the voluminous evidence demonstrating the toxic nature of fluoride.

Citizens of Denton, Texas are still fighting to keep fracking banned within city limits despite the vote last November in favor of the ban. Ever since the vote, state lawmakers in cahoots with the oil and gas industry and the American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC, have attempted to strip municipalities like Denton of home rule authority to override the city’s ban, according to Frack Free Denton.

(Washington, DC)—The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has agreed to regulate novel nanomaterial pesticides as a result of a lawsuit filed by Center for Food Safety (CFS) in December. In 2008, a coalition of nonprofits led by CFS filed a 116-page legal petition, requesting, among other things, that EPA recognize the growing class of nano-silver consumer products and their risks and regulate them as new pesticides.

Heirloom seeds come from open-pollinated plants that pass on similar characteristics and traits from the parent plant to the child plant. There is no concrete definition that every gardener uses to define heirloom plants. Some people state that heirloom plants are those that were introduced before 1951, while others state that heirloom varieties are those introduced before the 1920s. In general, you should consider heirlooms to be seeds that are possible to regrow and pass on from one generation to the next.

One important thing to note for heirloom plants is whether they are organic or non-organic. In most cases, heirloom plants are organic because they are generally only used by small-scale gardeners who do not use pesticide or other harmful chemicals.

If I asked you what you had for lunch, you could probably tell me without hesitation. If I asked what your child had for lunch at school, could you answer just as easily? Even if you know the lunch menu, what’s actually in the food may be a mystery. A look at one school’s burger found it had 26 ingredients. Among those 26 components, it contained disodium inosinate, a flavor additive that can spike heart rate, and caramel color, which contains sulfites and ammonia.

Monsanto positions itself as a champion of science and GM supporters tar critics as ‘anti-science’.* But is this accurate? Claire Robinson looks at how scientists who investigate the safety of GM foods are treated.

When Australian scientist Judy Carman decided to carry out an animal feeding study with GM crops, she asked three GMO companies to supply seeds. One company didn’t reply; another wanted the details of her study first.

Monsanto sent her a legal document to sign stating that she would give the company the results of the study before publication.

Wisconsin ranks second in the United States for total number of organic farms, behind only California. Wisconsin has about 1,180 organic farms, representing about 8 percent of all the organic farms in the country, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s 2012 Census of Agriculture.

There were about 1,250 certified organic farms in the state in 2013, up 77 percent since 2005. That’s 2013 data obtained from USDA’s National Organic Program, which also showed 233 certified organic handlers, i.e. businesses and processors.

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